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No, not really. The extra frames are mostly wasted -- many won't even make it to the display buffer. The power used to render those frames is likewise wasted. Vsync = capped FPS, but also puts a maximum on the GPU/CPU load = lower temps and lower power consumption.

You -do- want some overhead so that you can maintain an FPS at or very close to your 'cap', which is where having a more powerful rig can help, but there is no reason to be rendering ~120FPS on a 60hz monitor.

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I find it annoying that people don't understand that when they have a 26 inch or 32 inch monitor of course they can see more detail and more motion, but somehow expect that to translate down to a 15 inch or 19 inch monitor.

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There's a lot of debate to if the human eye can really detect anything above 60FPS. Some will claim 30 is the human eye limit.

Personally, i feel like i can tell the difference between 60 and 90 but, it's gets harder to perceive the higher you go regardless.

It's a niche thing.

And yes you can see the difference. However, after playing for a while you start to forget. It will depend on whom your asking which forms the debate imo.
I have a 120 hz monitor on which I play games up to 120 Fps and it's mostly noticeable when I switch from a 120 fps game to a 60 fps game.
Then its like "whoa" I can spot the difference. You can actually experience that difference. 120hz is really like it's made within actual reality, as if every frame is glued onto the next one while 60hz still feels its fabricated.
Playing on 120hz for some time will get you to notice when you play a 60fps game. My experience is that your eyes acclimatize to the fluidity of what is perceived. In normal gameplay it hardly doesn't matter. When you actually start playing you are immersed into the game and the perception of fluidity is ignored.
When I played on the older consoles starting with 15-30 fps I thought that was all we should expect and I wasn't bothered. To imagine 60 or even 120fps was a ludicrous unnecessary thing not to ever be expected.

For me personally it's that slight advantage in games where it can be beneficial like competitive shooters. In shooters it's sometimes milliseconds per each confrontation to having a high kill streak at the end of a match or a low one.
In racing games and in flightsims it's just beautiful immersion. I like to be on edge in such kind of games so the combination of my own skill, the monitor refresh rate, game, keyboard, mouse settings and of course the people I play with all contribute to having that edge. If there aren't clear niche, competitive or luxury reasons imo then having 120 hz refresh rate ability is a waste of money.

The discussion about how many fps the human eye can see also seems dependable. While there may be a actual limit biologically some people make their basis based on actively comparing video clips with one another to see where this limit lies. These grou of people try to look harder and tend to find and thus "see" more difference. Other people make their basis upon the perception of this during immersed gameplay.
These groups of people are expectedly the ones making their assumption based on immersed gameplay and are more likely to not ever recognize the visual evidence between the lower and higher framerates. Both groups debate to one another in endless discussion on the internet and scientifically nobody is the wiser. I think it's hard to draw a actual number because there's individual difference and the way to measure it has to many dynamics to have a universal answer.

Then there is assumably genetic difference or trained optical differences. Remember, some people are more nocturnal then others while some have a much better far sight. Ultimately the human eyes weren't made to see fast paced slideshows of different framerates which video is, rather to visualize actual reality which isn't made out of frames but perceived as continuous visual fluidity.

Although this topic is interesting otherwise I wouldn't comment the way I do I think the best thing people should do is go to a tech mall, compare the different games and monitors or behind any of your friends rigs and personally decide if you want the same eye candy. As with everything, the more you scale things up the lower the end sum is, like with rockets for instance Less is more!

On 10/3/2018 at 12:49 AM, Nightside said:

Is there any benefit to having FPS > Hz? My monitor has a refresh rate of 59 Hz, is there any reason to keep FPS much higher than that?

I would definitely have overhead like Shadowmage pointed out. Having 70-75 fps at least on a 59 hz monitor should really be your goal when tweaking any game settings.

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And yes you can see the difference. However, after playing for a while you start to forget. It will depend on whom your asking which forms the debate imo.
I have a 120 hz monitor on which I play games up to 120 Fps and it's mostly noticeable when I switch from a 120 fps game to a 60 fps game.
Then its like "whoa" I can spot the difference. You can actually experience that difference. 120hz is really like it's made within actual reality, as if every frame is glued onto the next one while 60hz still feels its fabricated.
Playing on 120hz for some time will get you to notice when you play a 60fps game. My experience is that your eyes acclimatize to the fluidity of what is perceived. In normal gameplay it hardly doesn't matter. When you actually start playing you are immersed into the game and the perception of fluidity is ignored.
When I played on the older consoles starting with 15-30 fps I thought that was all we should expect and I wasn't bothered. To imagine 60 or even 120fps was a ludicrous unnecessary thing not to ever be expected.

For me personally it's that slight advantage in games where it can be beneficial like competitive shooters. In shooters it's sometimes milliseconds per each confrontation to having a high kill streak at the end of a match or a low one.
In racing games and in flightsims it's just beautiful immersion. I like to be on edge in such kind of games so the combination of my own skill, the monitor refresh rate, game, keyboard, mouse settings and of course the people I play with all contribute to having that edge. If there aren't clear niche, competitive or luxury reasons imo then having 120 hz refresh rate ability is a waste of money.

The discussion about how many fps the human eye can see also seems dependable. While there may be a actual limit biologically some people make their basis based on actively comparing video clips with one another to see where this limit lies. These grou of people try to look harder and tend to find and thus "see" more difference. Other people make their basis upon the perception of this during immersed gameplay.
These groups of people are expectedly the ones making their assumption based on immersed gameplay and are more likely to not ever recognize the visual evidence between the lower and higher framerates. Both groups debate to one another in endless discussion on the internet and scientifically nobody is the wiser. I think it's hard to draw a actual number because there's individual difference and the way to measure it has to many dynamics to have a universal answer.

Then there is assumably genetic difference or trained optical differences. Remember, some people are more nocturnal then others while some have a much better far sight. Ultimately the human eyes weren't made to see fast paced slideshows of different framerates which video is, rather to visualize actual reality which isn't made out of frames but perceived as continuous visual fluidity.

Although this topic is interesting otherwise I wouldn't comment the way I do I think the best thing people should do is go to a tech mall, compare the different games and monitors or behind any of your friends rigs and personally decide if you want the same eye candy. As with everything, the more you scale things up the lower the end sum is, like with rockets for instance Less is more!

I would definitely have overhead like Shadowmage pointed out. Having 70-75 fps at least on a 59 hz monitor should really be your goal when tweaking any game settings.

Oh I'm not going to argue higher hz = pointless. I generally agree. I can certainly detect a difference between 60 and 120 (i think 240 might be pushing it though). I have a friend that plays Quake Live competitively and he big deals boosting frame-rate. I've never cared much about bunny-hopping shooters though. XD

I've had my brother in law tell me 4K is useless since "you can't see higher than 1080". A claim that's debatable for a number of reasons, I don't know if he's looked at many, but i can certainly tell the difference, and most of those have crown considerably from 1080 so the pixel density is probably not much than 50% better. I suspect my eye's are a good deal less-bad than his though.

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You brother-in-law is heavily underestimating the power of the human eye. The human eye has tens of millions of stems, while a 1080p screen has only a bit more than 2 million pixels. I've yet to see the first screen that seems like a window, instead of a projected image. There are still a lot of gains to be made.

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You brother-in-law is heavily underestimating the power of the human eye. The human eye has tens of millions of stems, while a 1080p screen has only a bit more than 2 million pixels. I've yet to see the first screen that seems like a window, instead of a projected image. There are still a lot of gains to be made.

I have some family that are incredibly stubborn. They put me to shame. The human eye dosen't quite work the same as a monitor does though. We don't really see in a fixed resolution.

I've been quite fond of 4k displays, although they still seem a bit 2D. Kinda wish 3D TV's had caught on more. Would have pushed innovation.

6 hours ago, Ruedii said:

If your refresh rate is 40hz or higher, absolutely not.

If your refresh rate is around 30hz or 20hz (like on some low-end mobile displays) then higher frame rates have an advantage due to physics being synced to frame rate.

I've seen some crappy displays, and i don't think i've ever seen one that was only 30hz. Unless your talking ancient CRT TV's.

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I have some family that are incredibly stubborn. They put me to shame. The human eye dosen't quite work the same as a monitor does though. We don't really see in a fixed resolution.

I've been quite fond of 4k displays, although they still seem a bit 2D. Kinda wish 3D TV's had caught on more. Would have pushed innovation.

I've seen some crappy displays, and i don't think i've ever seen one that was only 30hz. Unless your talking ancient CRT TV's. ﻿

Old laptops sometimes had them. Some tablet computers still have them. 60Hz interlaced was actually common on older CRT monitor displays for higher resolutions, because the horizontal sweep couldn't reach high enough rates to handle the higher row count.

1080i is technically 30Hz for a full refresh (two vertical sweeps for a full refresh).

Edited October 24, 2018 by Ruedii

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@Nightside If your monitor is capped at 60Hz, but your GPU can push a lot more, you could opt to increase all the quality setting to max instead. Pushing more frames will waste processing power like Mage said, and it might even cause other glitches.

And yes, you can definitely see the difference between a 60Hz and a 120Hz monitor, let alone 240Hz on a 1080p. I just switched from a 60Hz to a 120Hz 3440x1440 and will never go back. Some games only push 80Hz at this resolution, but even that is still noticeable vs 60Hz. Running Fallout4 at 120Hz capped (boatload of manual settings in the files) which gives anything between 50-120Hz in-game. Add to that a high dpi mouse with low sensitivity settings and it makes for a much smoother experience (no use in KSP though).

But beware... KSP is severely limited by itself, meaning that if you have more than a few dozen parts in a ship, frame rate will drop to under 40Hz even though you have the CPU and GPU to do a lot better. I recently went from a 4790K@4GHz to a 8086K@5Ghz and saw no change in fps on the same view of my station; stuck at 35-37fps. Dito when going from a GTX970 to a GTX1080Ti, or from 16Gb to 32GB of ram (even 1600 to 3200MHz). In short, hardware is only a bottleneck if you are running an outdated system. For everything else it is hindered by Unity and KSP itself, not the hardware.

So in short: bump up graphics settings to the max and enjoy. No need to spit out more frames than the monitor can handle.

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@NightsideAnd yes, you can definitely see the difference between a 60Hz and a 120Hz monitor, let alone 240Hz on a 1080p. I just switched from a 60Hz to a 120Hz 3440x1440 and will never go back. Some games only push 80Hz at this resolution, but even that is still noticeable vs 60Hz. Running Fallout4 at 120Hz capped (boatload of manual settings in the files) which gives anything between 50-120Hz in-game. Add to that a high dpi mouse with low sensitivity settings and it makes﻿ for a much smoother experience (no use in KSP though).

The visibility of framerate has more to do with how fast things are moving on the screen relative to physical distance on the screen. So the bigger the screen the more you will notice improvement from higher framerate.

The same goes with higher resolution, as the bigger the image is being scaled to the bigger the pixels.

I find it annoying that people don't understand that when they have a 26 inch or 32 inch monitor of course they can see more detail and more motion, but somehow expect that to translate down to a 15 inch or 19 inch monitor.

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Honestly, I doubt that KSP has things move fast enough on a regular basis to make higher refresh rates noticeable on a non-VR display. It isn't like it's a first person shooter game where you have to aim at moving targets.

Honestly, if I was choosing a monitor for KSP, I'd go for other display quality attributes, such as higher resolution. KSP suffers from bad anisotropy and aliasing and a higher resolution would reduce this.